This was especially frustrating in the wake of the 2015 World Science Fiction Convention, after which the ponderously self-important blowhard John C. Wright publicly accused veteran editor and lifelong fan Patrick Nielsen Hayden of both assaulting Wright’s wife and masterminding the long-term “corruption” of the Hugo Awards, to which the SF/F field largely replied: “Meh.” Now, some of that is certainly due to Wright’s tireless self-marginalization and frothing bigotry, but regardless, I think Patrick deserved better of his friends and colleagues. He deserved to have someone stand up and state plainly what he could not– that John C. Wright talks a big game about truth and courage, but that he is demonstrably full of shit.

The only individual here who is completely full of shit is the habitually vulgar Scott Lynch. Wright was telling the truth about Patrick Nielsen Hayden's unprofessional and inappropriate verbal attack on Mr. Wright's wife, and he is also telling the truth about PNH's involvement in corrupting the Hugo Awards. No one stood up and defended PNH because they knew that Wright was telling the truth: PNH is a hot-tempered, unprofessional, and literally uneducated awards whore.

I know it too. I have had direct, personal conversations with a senior executive at an SF publishing house who confirmed that Patrick Nielsen Hayden is a shameless award-chaser who was finally persuaded to finally step back and recuse himself one year so that a perennial second-placer could have a chance to win an award, before promptly putting himself forward again in order to chase more awards.

I don't know if PNH's awards-whoring is due to his shame at being one of the very few without a high school degree in a highly literate field; perhaps he thinks collecting awards will somehow compensate for his inferiority complex or perhaps he simply requires external approval for his efforts. Whatever the reason, the simple fact is that PNH and the little coterie of authors around him have connived, pimped, and collaborated to manipulate the Hugo Awards process on their own behalf for well over a decade. This isn't up for debate. It's the recent history of the Hugo Awards.

In fact, the ONLY reason that two different Best Editor awards exist in the first place is because PNH was whining and crying to anyone who would listen about the fact that he kept losing out to short form editors like Gardner Dozois. And no sooner did the Puppies knock him out of contention in 2015 than his site became the center of efforts to change the rules so that PNH would be able to reliably nominate himself for Best Editor (Long Form) again.

Wright makes these points clear over and over again on his own time, and the fact that he’s a bigoted goofball is hardly a state secret. What is important is that nothing he’s tried to push about the Hugo Awards or about Patrick Nielsen Hayden has any scintilla of truth to it, and anyone who tries to tell you differently in the coming months is either a liar or a water carrier for a depressingly stupid conspiracy theory spun by liars.

It's amusing to see Lynch talk about what isn't a state secret, considering what he obviously doesn't know about PNH. Scott Lynch clearly doesn't know a damn thing about any of this. He wasn't there at the time that Patrick Nielsen Hayden verbally attacked Mrs. Wright and he isn't sufficiently well connected in publishing circles to know the truth about what an insecure little awards whore PNH is.

In a post to his own weblog, Scalzi expresses regret that I personally didn’t make the “Best Professional Editor” ballot, despite the fact that I acquired three out of the five Best Novel nominees and personally shepherded two of them to publication. This is generous of John, and I wouldn’t have declined the nomination, but in fact as every book editor in our field knows, while the Best Professional Hugo is regularly awarded to high-profile magazine editors and anthologists, it only goes to book editors if we die. It’s for this reason that there’s a pending proposal to split the editorial award into “long form” and “short form” categories; whether this will be ratified by this year’s Worldcon Business Meeting is anyone’s guess.

How generous of John indeed! Fortunately, PNH was able to repay that generosity at Macmillan's expense. Notice that PNH doesn't see fit to mention mention that he was the co-sponsor of the new award.

I sought out Patrick Nielsen Hayden’s support for the Editor’s split and brought him into the fold; I needed a prominent editor to co-sponsor the amendment or it would never have been taken seriously by the Business Meeting.
- Chris Barkley

Both Mr. and Mrs. Wright were published by Tor Books, and they know the same thing I do as a result of my conversations with the publishing executive. PNH was colluding and conspiring and campaigning for awards long before the Sad Puppies entered the picture, and long-time industry professionals know it.

In any event, the fact that Macmillan still hasn't responded to the complaints about PNH's Code of Conduct violation means that it is time to start requesting responses from them again. And if they don't respond to his unprovoked and unprofessional attack on a woman of Jewish descent, then the matter will be brought to the employment authorities.

McRapey's take: "What it looks like when one writer calls another writer onto the carpet, and then sets the carpet on fire.... Seriously, I think I'm just gonna spend my day eating ice cream and
figuring out what part of science fiction I'm totes ruining next."

69 Comments:

Isn't Mr Lynch, like many of his progressive brethren, publically known to be prone to bouts of mental illness? Perhaps the clinically confirmed depression that stops him writing is affecting his mental processes in other ways. That could explain these delusional rantings. Or it might be common-or-garden syphilis.

Besides my anxiety attacks and other psychosexual issues, one of the most irritating things I have to deal with is attacks by right wing bigot poopylords. Really, right wingers should all be banned. Not just from my blog comments, but BANNED... if you know what I mean.

Besides, Patrick's trouser cheeks taste like asparagus, and I like asparagus.

Oh and THIS is highly problematic:

@3

Here's Scott and his sexy girlfriend.Try to guess which is which.

How dare you insult xer! Xe is a beautiful... uh... standing there on the the lef... er, ri..., erm... Wait, which one am I again?

I enjoyed reading the anti-adventures of the Gentlemen Bastards. Lynch tells a good heist/pirate yarn (even with some SJW-style feminism thrown in).I see, however, that Lynch is using his fiction as a How-To-- the LIES of Locke Lamora. So Lynch's entire premise is based on the following: "I know somebody who was there and HE said it wasn't that way! I TOTES trust this person becuz he is a member of the Good People, an' those Good People never never LIE!"It is telling that there is only virtue signaling going on here-- Lynch (and Martin, Kirby, etc.) are not actually interested in the truth, so no reconciliation is possible with these folks.They always argue as if they were interested in compromise, yet the hand held out is a distraction from the poisoned dagger hidden in the hand behind their backs.

I started reading Lynch a few years back, before I discovered Vox Popoli.

The Lies of Locke Lamora was decent (3 out of 5 stars). I enjoyed the Ocean's 11 feel to it and looked forward to book 2.

Book 2', Red Skies Over Red Seas (I think that is the name, anyway) was a huge disappointment. It started out OK but suffered from an identity crisis: Did it want to be a heist story or a pirate story? A skilled author could pull off both but Lynch wasn't that author. It was disjointed and ultimately, anti-climactic.

I didn't get 2 chapters into the third and latest book (delayed a few years due to Lynch's issues with clinical depression). The third book, what I read of it, anyway, was just a mess. Couldn't get up the ambition to finish it when there are so many other authors out there to read.

And somehow, given what I once read on his old website, his half-assed commentary on Mr. Wright doesn't surprise me.

a satyrical ( read carefully, that may not mean what you think it means ) sperm whale, for instance.

14. KoranBurningFaggot January 02, 2016 4:20 PMI thought people planned on wearing recording devices in case something like this happened.

Vox and i both recommended this on multiple occasions. however, not everyone is interested in shelling out the extra zogbux necessary to set up a personal recording system and, i'm sure, the Wright's thought that their status as honest to god professionals ( they're both published authors ) would insulate them from the festivities.

i can't speak for Vox, but part of the reason that i was making the public recommendation was to preemptively subdue whatever public acting out by the SFWA fascists that there would be.

A couple of notes:1. Perhaps this could be used to get TOR to sign over Wrights books to Castalia, a long shot I know but who knows what PNH will stoop to.

2. The post he made before this one was August 5th where he apologizes that he couldn't put out a book that year due to "the severity of my ongoing anxiety attacks has simply made it impossible to turn the manuscript in." He should take a lesson from Scalzi and put a smiley face on that.

I thought people planned on wearing recording devices in case something like this happened.

Vox and i both recommended this on multiple occasions. however, not everyone is interested in shelling out the extra zogbux necessary to set up a personal recording system and, i'm sure, the Wright's thought that their status as honest to god professionals ( they're both published authors ) would insulate them from the festivities.

Washington is an all party consent state, it would have been useful only to keep you from getting convicted for a worse crime. However Missouri, where this year's Worldcon will be held, is a one part consent state. And it doesn't take many zogbux, I can recommend this small device which goes for 20 of them. Put it in a shirt pocket and it does an adequate job.

I'm trying to be objective here. Lynch is a brilliant writer. He has a simple way of saying things, although, very clear, to the point and shows that he's a very well read person. And he argues his case very well.

The first thing that came to my mind about the PNH and Mrs Wright encounter, was the security camera, if there was one, that could have captured the moment. It happened near the reception area and normally in any facility there would be one.

I think Lynch made a very good point when he said:However, anyone who isn’t a thrashing self-absorbed pee baby understands that the Hugos are a crap shoot born at the intersection of popular tastes and ever-shifting geographic adjustments to the pool of eligible voters.

Of course the Hugo is a popularity contest. Even if PNH indeed gamed the results, without the voters-fans, his effort would be irrelevant. It just goes to show that the Puppies just don't have the numbers.

What about reform the Hugo to be set up like the Man Booker prize. Like, nominated work for various categories are judged by people that "know something about literature" and judges are changed every year. A category for People's choice award can also be created, by which fans can vote.

So now the question is who will select the judges. Maybe something from the corporate world model like board of directors will select the judges,and a the board should be composed of people from any sides of the political spectrum.

Alright, maybe my idea is impractical, unconstitutional and even expensive. Maybe even cooky.

@25 - Waddling Walruses is good, but they might be confused with a Manatee.@32 - Bombastic Budgie has a certain ring to it.Hectoring Hamsters?The Hares of Halitosis?Hassling Hyena?Bothering Bovines?Aggravating Albatross?

@37 - Yes, a wolf-back is fine for US, but using "attack dogs" in reference to the "blustering budgies" of others (such as in the title of this post), it gives them the patina of respectability (not that we really care about what they think is respectable, but you know what I mean).

So we need a good name for the frothing echo-chamber spewers for, and followers of, the Torlings.

Ran afoul of a progressive retard named Scott Lynch on USENET Star Trek boards back in the late '80s/early '90s. Probably not the same guy based on Steve (tDN0M) and his post @3 (w/ picture), but he certainly sounds just as stupid.

Is the argument over the volume at which the insult was delivered to my wife's face, not the fact of it?

Am I to be reviled as a liar in uncouth scatological terms because I repeated the report given me that the insult was very loud; whereas Mr. Hayden, speaking on his own behalf, says that he shouted down the short female underling he was browbeating in a tone that was only slightly loud?

If I were his attorney, I would advise him to drop this particular line of defense.

It is a very good point. In fact, it is Larry Correia's point. It is the point that the SJWs in science fiction repeatedly denied until Sad Puppies exposed their antics and proved that the "literary awards" are nothing but a popularity contest.

That's easy. He's the one with weak, supplicating smile. She's the one who looks like she's sucking on a lemon.

Ah, but with SJW couples, isn't it always the woman (or approximate equivalent thereof) who wears the belligerent, assertive, masculine expression, and the 'man' who bears the submissive, tentative, feminine look.

@27: " ... third and latest book (delayed a few years due to Lynch's issues with clinical depression)."

Hmm, trying to figure out why such deeply personal issues would be shared with the world at large. I really miss the days when people used discretion; whatever happened to "personal business" or "personal issues"?

Ah, but with SJW couples, isn't it always the woman (or approximate equivalent thereof) who wears the belligerent, assertive, masculine expression, and the 'man' who bears the submissive, tentative, feminine look.

I'm not naïve and have seen all sorts of Dunning-Krueger afflicted, egotistical cretins crawl up or get kicked up the ranks of various industries, but I wonder how a such weasel as PNH made it in the publishing industry? I'm not disputing that it's impossible for such a creature to do so, I'm just interested in the particular case of PNH. Did he lock lips on the buttocks of the right people at the right time - because for certain successful buttkissers there is going to be someone who is receptive to having their butt kissed. Is he a favor-currier, does he have "the dirt" on the right people in the right positions? Who can say?

He started out in fandom and he's been there for decades. If you look at what he edited, he hasn't actually been very successful. Despite being the largest, most-awarded SF/F publisher, Tor has missed out on all of the successful SF/F series since Robert Jordan.